吴恩达 baidu 邮件, 感觉学技术也要会一些宫闱密术

Dear fellow Baiduers,

On May 17, 2015, the organizers of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) contacted Baidu’s Heterogenous Computing team, a five-member computer systems engineering group, to inform them that they had exceeded the allowable weekly number of submissions to the ImageNet server.

Immediately, we launched our own inquiry to understand what had happened. While the inquiry was underway, we specifically refrained from making public comments to the press and on social media, out of fairness to both the Baidu employees and the ImageNet organizers. This week, we concluded the inquiry.

We found that the team's leader, Wu Ren, had directed junior engineers to submit more than two submissions per week, a breach of the current ImageNet rules.

Any action that runs counter to the highest standards of academic integrity and scientific integrity, no matter how large or small, is completely unacceptable and does not reflect the culture of our company. We have zero tolerance for such behavior. We have therefore terminated Wu Ren’s employment with the company, which has taken effect immediately.

During the inquiry, we verified that the Heterogenous Computing team's work was not connected in any way to any image recognition research by other teams at Baidu. We are also reorganizing the Heterogenous Computing team, and placing the remaining four junior engineers under the leadership of Xu Wei, under whom we expect to receive better guidance.

It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of integrity. On matters of integrity, there is no compromise, and there is no “gray zone.” We must learn from this experience, and never allow any individual or any team to make any similar transgression.

There were several specific points of failure relating to this incident which I’d like to mention, because they are instructive for us going forward.

First, in the early days, some of the junior engineers had heard rumors of other organizations having multiple ImageNet accounts, and thus felt it was okay to have multiple accounts. However, others’ transgressions do not mean we can do the same.

Second, because the team was a computer systems rather a computer vision team, they didn’t understand the importance of avoiding overfitting, and there was also some ambiguity about the application of the ImageNet rules. If we don’t understand a rule, we can seek clarifications, but one must nonetheless be careful not to commit a transgression of it.

Finally, Wu Ren had supervised a team of junior engineers, who unfortunately did not receive early critical feedback from other leaders or from more knowledgeable computer vision researchers that their behavior was unacceptable. In order to give junior engineers an outlet and safe place to discuss any concerns, we are forming a Scientific Advisory panel that engineers with questions can confidentially and safely approach for advice.

The Scientific Advisory panel will initially comprise senior scientists Zhang Tong, Xu Wei, Huang Chang, and me. Any engineer who is concerned about the scientific integrity of any action of any team or individual is required to approach a member of this panel to ask their advice. If an engineer fails to approach the Scientific Advisory panel in a timely manner with their concerns and is subsequently involved in an act that breaches scientific or academic integrity, then even if these actions were carried out with the knowledge or direction of their supervisor, the engineer may be dismissed.

As our technology advances and as we become more prominent globally, we will naturally experience greater levels of global scrutiny. In today’s environment, it is also possible for the malfeasance of 2-3 engineers to tarnish the work and reputation of 47,000 others.

However, the reason for behaving with integrity is not that we are worried about external scrutiny. We will behave with integrity because it is who we are, and because this is how we want to build our company. Any other behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.

Andrew Ng